Saruman down South

Greetings from St. Francisville, Louisiana, my hometown. I'm down here visiting my family for a few days. I haven't been here for seven or eight months, so my folks warned me not to be too shocked when I saw the clearing-away that the state had done to make way for the four-lane highway.

Well, I was shocked. Flabbergasted. Appalled. It looks like what Saruman did to the forests around Isengard. "Look at those great oaks," my dad said as we passed what was once Mr. Clyde Harvey's yard, but which is now going to be the outermost northbound lane, and the shoulder. There were no oaks there anymore, only stumps. And dirt. Miles of this!

The truth is, this has to happen. West Feliciana Parish is rapidly growing, and expanding the highway must be done to accomodate the increased traffic. Still, I don't have to like it. A big part of the landscape of my youth -- trees, trees, trees -- is now destroyed. Progress. I found myself driving into town this morning, thinking about how one day I'm going to say to my boys, "This used to not be like this. When I was a boy." And then I thought: That's exactly what my dad said to me about the same place when I was a kid." When my dad was the same age as my son Matthew, he stood out on the shoulder of U.S. Highway 61 and saluted as First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt's motorcade passed by. Highway 61 was a gravel road then.

Everything was different then, I guess. When I was a boy in the early 1970s, same age as my son Lucas, my mom used to give me a couple of diapers and watch me as I walked through a pecan orchard and around the bend to the little cabin where my ancient aunts (great-great-great aunts, to be precise) Lois and Hilda lived. I'd spend the day with them, and they'd tell me about serving in the Red Cross in France during the Great War, and all the exciting things that happened to them once upon a time (a French soldier grabbed Hilda on the Champs-Elysees when the armistice was announced, and kissed her square on the lips; I don't think she ever got over it). Lois, an accomplished amateur horticulturalist, would take me into her garden, and lean on her bamboo staff while telling me about japonicas, camellias, magnolias and all the other flowering trees and bushes in her orchard. I'd climb trees in her dense little forest, and create my own imaginary worlds in the bamboo grove. I had no idea how good I had it back then. That was just life in the country.

Hilda and Lois are long dead. Their property was sold ages ago, all the trees chopped down, the cabin destroyed, and the whole place is now a housing development. I'm the last one in my extended family to have any living memory of life there (I mean, I'm the youngest member who can remember them). When I'm dead and gone, it will be like they never existed.

I know, I know: life is like that. Everything changes. But I tell you, when my children are grown, and if they come back here to visit their cousins, they are going to be tourists in the Geography of Nowhere. I can't count that as anything but a loss, though I am equally at a loss to say how it could have been prevented. What's such a puzzle to me is I never meet people who are happy with how things are changing around here, but most everybody wants a Wal-Mart to come to town.

Here's something interesting: there are Mexican laborers in town now. More and more of them. A local businessman said to me, "If you want to get anything done nowadays, you have to hire Mexicans." He explained that the black day laborers that people around here used to hire for agricultural or small-scale construction work aren't available anymore. He speculated that this must have something to do with the way the drug culture -- especially crack -- has made serious inroads into the black community here. Frankly, I'm so shocked by this that I can't even think about being sad. Crack for sale in this sleepy Southern town. I guess I'm too Romantic, too naive.